For her part, Klein "came of age politically," she told me, with the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, when she was 29, shortly after which her international best-seller No Logo made her an intellectual star of the anti-globalization movement. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, her 2007 magnum opus, exposed the ways neoliberal free-market profiteers have exploited chaos and catastrophe in disaster zones, from hurricane-shocked New Orleans to "shock-and-awe"-shocked Iraq.

So seeing McKibben and Klein on stage together, launching a mathematical and moral assault on the carbon corporatocracy, says something significant about the charged atmosphere of this particular moment — as we end a year, the warmest on record, in which we lost half the Arctic ice cap and saw off-the-charts global weather extremes, while the political and media establishments seemed not to notice. It also says something about the direction the climate movement may be taking — or, rather, the direction McKibben and Klein argue it should be taking, as they seek to merge climate and economic justice in a way that goes beyond both traditional environmentalism and the old-school, climate-clueless left.

Each has a tough-love message for their own constituency — McKibben for an insular environmental movement that's been woefully ineffective on climate; Klein for a left, including many in the Occupy movement, that has failed to grapple with the seriousness and urgency of the climate crisis. Look, they're saying, this is it: science tells us that time is running out, and everything you've ever fought for is on the line. Climate change has the ability to undo your historic victories and crush your present struggles. So it's time to come together, for real, and fight to preserve and extend what you care most about — which means engaging in the climate fight, really engaging, as if your life and your life's work, even life itself, depended on it. Because they do.

Klein, as it happens, is at work on a book in which she hopes to tie all of this together. Due to appear late next year, it's part of a joint project with her husband, documentary filmmaker Avi Lewis. In a long interview from her home in Toronto before coming to Boston, Klein explained how the book and film — separate but interrelated pieces of a larger whole — make an ambitious argument, one she first laid out in a cover story for The Nation last November, "Capitalism vs. the Climate."

Get it done Unity College, a small school in Waldo County with a focus on environmental issues, announced this year that it will pull its investments from the fossil-fuel industry — underscoring that institutions of higher education have a responsibility to address climate change.

Bill McKibben’s climate change crusade comes to Providence Environmental activist and journalist Bill McKibben was at the heart of the remarkable uprising that forced President Obama to delay approval of the Keystone pipeline, which would funnel oil from the tar sands of Canada to the Gulf Coast.

Harvard students push for fossil-fuel divestment Throughout 350.org's Do the Math tour this month, climate-change warrior Bill McKibben has blasted Harvard, his alma mater, for the school's failure to fully divest from South African companies two decades ago.

Truth to power It's the end of the world as we know it in author and environmental journalist Bill McKibben's latest book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (St. Martin's Griffin).

Maine's cohousing movement gains ground An architect, a professor, a dentist, and a teacher. Children as young as six and retirees in their 60s and 70s. Musicians and massage therapists and artists; Mainers and folks from away. All living together, sharing common space.

Generation gap It’s an uneven show with a dour vision that leaves a mediciny taste in your mouth — and, I think, offers signs of a generation gap among curators.

Opening pitch The most moving moment of this year’s Boston Symphony Orchestra opening gala came before the concert started — the standing ovation for James Levine, who looked rested and recuperated after his kidney surgery this summer, an operation that forced him to cancel most of his Tanglewood season.